This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

The North American Bridge Championships is in Toronto — here’s why I won’t miss it

The game was once an international, pop-culture sensation. Now, it’s relegated to synagogue basements and seniors’ centres.

There are 635,013,559,600 possible bridge hands, with a virtually endless number of variations.
(Carlos Osorio / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

By Jordan HimelfarbThe Toronto Star

Sat., July 15, 2017

There was a time when the North American Bridge Championships, coming to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre next week, would have been covered in detail in this newspaper. You would have known the names of the champions and the contenders. You might even have followed every hand.

Today, if you think of it at all, you probably imagine a fluorescent-lit cavern stuffed with grandmothers. You wouldn’t be too far off. Most of the 5,000 players who will attend the tournament are seniors. My wife and I, who are in our 30s, will be among the youngest competitors, perfectly content to spend 10 summer days playing cards in a frigid conference hall. We wouldn’t miss it.

The drama of the event, the insights, the stakes, both financial and less worldly, the frustrating failures of communication, the moments of miraculous connection, the fiery arguments and looming suspicions, the rare joys of the game — these might surprise those on the outside of the difficult and wonderful world of bridge.

My love affair with the game began about two years ago, with an appropriately antique instigation. My wife, Ivy, took an interest while reading Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth, in which an early version of the game leads the beautiful socialite Lily Bart to squander a fortune.

If time is money, we have followed suit. For Ivy and me, small talk is increasingly bridge talk. Hardly an hour goes by without my considering, for instance, whether under certain circumstances it would be better to finesse a king or take my tricks and run.

Article Continued Below

Edna Janus during a bridge game at Lee's Bridge Club at Temple Sinai. (Carlos Osorio)

As young players, we are an anomaly, but it wasn’t always so. The world’s greatest card game was not always the exclusive and esoteric domain of the retired. For many decades, it was a near-universal pastime.

Contract bridge was derived from auction bridge, Lily Bart’s vice, which itself came from the popular 18th-century English card game whist. The current form of the game was invented in 1925 by the American railway magnate, champion yachtsman and card maven Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, who introduced the modern scoring system while on a cruise ship heading to Havana.

His game caught on with astonishing speed. In 1931, the great bridge impresario Ely Culbertson mounted the “Bridge Battle of the Century” in New York City, a high-stakes contest that pitted Culbertson and his wife against two leading boffins. For the match’s six-week duration, the New York Times covered every trick in exhaustive detail.

By 1940, nearly half of all North American households had an active contract bridge player. Charles Goren, who succeeded Culbertson as the game’s most renowned ambassador, appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1958. Between 1959 and 1964, Goren hosted a TV show on which bridge enthusiasts, including celebrities such as Groucho and Chico Marx, would play hands for the camera. (You can find episodes on YouTube. Even for me they’re painfully dull.)

In the early 1960s, bridge was still ubiquitous. The actor Omar Sharif, then among the world’s best players, co-wrote with Goren a popular syndicated bridge column for the Chicago Tribune. Many of the older players we compete against tell us that, during their university days, the game was the preferred alternative to lectures. Apparently everybody played — and not just in the West. One bridge teacher told me he learned the rules as part of basic training in the Shah of Iran’s foreign service.

Ruth Robert plays bridge at Lee's Bridge Club at Temple Sinai. Toronto, like most cities, has seen a diminution in the number of its bridge clubs. But around 20 remain, offering nearly 70 games per week at synagogues, universities, tennis clubs and other exotic locales. (Carlos Osorio)

But by the time I was at university, in the early 2000s, bridge had receded from view. Television, and the way it atomized North American social life, is often cited as the chief cause of the game’s decline, which is thought to have begun in the ’60s. The internet, video games and numerous other innovations continued television’s work. The American Contract Bridge League estimates that about 30 million North Americans, or fewer than one in 10, now know the rules of the game. Cheaper thrills are easy to find.

My wife and I like cheap thrills as much as the next millennial couple, but we were quickly hooked by the hard-won pleasures of bridge. We learned largely using instructional books, and hone our skills at club games, where we are often the youngest players by at least two decades.

Toronto, like most cities, has seen a diminution in the number of its bridge clubs. But around 20 remain, offering nearly 70 games per week at synagogues, universities, tennis clubs and other exotic locales.

The retirees whom we meet at these clubs often greet us enthusiastically as a good omen for the game’s future and encourage us to spread the gospel. But as bridge emissaries, we have failed miserably. The game is eye-glazingly difficult to explain, a central aspect of its existential challenge.

With that in mind, bear with me: to appreciate the beauty of bridge, you have to understand a bit about its mechanics.

Contract bridge was derived from auction bridge, Lily Bart’s vice, which itself came from the popular 18th-century English card game whist. (Carlos Osorio)

Bridge requires four people, two on two, with partners sitting opposite one another. Pairs attempt to take as many four-card tricks as possible, which is accomplished by playing the highest card in the suit led or the highest “trump” card.

But it’s the process of bidding in particular that makes the game so tricky to pick up. The “contract” — that is, how many tricks a partnership must take and which suit is trump, if any — is determined through a complex auction, involving a number of highly specialized bids. Learning to bid is like learning to communicate in a new language.

In many ways, the game is punishing. The more you study, the more you realize just how little you know. There are 635,013,559,600 possible bridge hands, an inexhaustible cache of often-devilishly difficult puzzles. I may one day become a Life Master, the bridge equivalent of a chess master, but I will never master the game.

The pain of bridge can put a heavy burden on partnerships, which sometimes split under the weight. Bridge is fundamentally a game of communication — and communication in bridge, as in life, can be deeply frustrating. Bidding has become so prolix that even experts often misunderstand each other, causing botched contracts and strife. Bickering and recriminations are constants in clubs and tournaments.

For this reason, it is often said that one ought not to partner in cards with one’s partner in life. The basis for this guideline is unassailable. In the mid-1920s, a divorce notice appeared in the Los Angeles Times announcing that a woman was seeking to end her marriage on the grounds that her husband had committed the ultimate betrayal: he trumped her ace.

Television, and the way it atomized North American social life, is often cited as the chief cause of the game’s decline, which is thought to have begun in the ’60s. (Beaty, Keith)

A few years later, in Kansas City, a woman named Myrtle Bennett went further. She shot her husband to death after he allegedly misplayed a contract of four spades. The judge at her trial must have been a bridge player; Bennett was acquitted on all counts and allowed to collect on her husband’s life-insurance policy.

Two years into our own life in bridge, my wife and I remain happily together and physically unharmed. I have yet to see a partnership turn violent or dissolve in anger. But I’ve seen something close.

The flip side of all this is that, as with life, in moments of mutual understanding the joys of the game are amplified because they’re shared.

As the American former world champion Sharon Osberg once wrote, “bridge is a very human game,” which turns not simply on strategy and tactics, but also on “trust, communication and patience.”

The writer Somerset Maugham, who was among Charles Goren’s casual bridge partners, said that “the essentials for playing a good game of bridge are to be truthful, clear-headed, and considerate, prudent but not averse to taking a risk, and not to cry over spilt milk.” These, he went on, are “perhaps also the essentials for playing the more important game of life.”

It may be this convergence of the analytic and the social, this mirroring of life’s diverse challenges, that sets bridge apart and inspires in its shrunken tribe of players a devotion that often borders on obsession.

It is because of this intense but rarefied fanaticism that a good number of the world’s best players are able to make an extraordinary living at the game. Multimillionaire enthusiasts, many of them high-flyers of finance, pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to hire experts to play with them at tournaments like the NABC.

Bridge requires four people, two on two, with partners sitting opposite one another. Pairs attempt to take as many four-card tricks as possible, which is accomplished by playing the highest card in the suit led or the highest “trump” card. (Carlos Osorio)

Competition for spots on these sponsored teams is now so heated that cheating has emerged as a persistent problem. In 2014, two German former world champions were banned from the game for 10 years after they were caught sonically signalling the contents of their hands to one another. Both physicians, they have come to be known as the Coughing Doctors.

More recently, a pair of young Israeli players, sponsored by the former CEO of Bear Stearns, raised eyebrows after a series of tournament performances of otherworldly precision. A leading Norwegian player, Boye Brogeland, posted videos of the Israeli team online and called on upstanding bridge players everywhere to help him figure out how they were cheating. It turned out the Israelis were illicitly arranging items in various positions on the table depending on which card they wanted led.

Among the wealthiest devotees of the game are Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who often turns up at tournaments like the NABC, and his rival for the title of world’s richest man, the oracular investor Warren Buffett. The two have significantly funded bridge programs for public schools, believing such lessons to be good both for the developing mind and the future of the game.

A bridge player mulls his next move in this Toronto Star file photo. (Doug Griffin)

“Bridge is such a sensational game,” Buffett once said, “that I wouldn’t mind being in jail if I had three cellmates who were decent players and who were willing to keep the game going 24 hours a day.”

As absurd as this sounds, my wife and I and many of the thousands of players who will toil with us in Toronto next week get it.

For those willing to put in the work, bridge offers something special. The “cold and austere” beauty of mathematics that Bertrand Russell once described can be found, too, in the logic of bidding and play. That beauty is starker because it is derived, against the odds, in tandem. A puzzle solved can be as satisfying as a melody resolved, and each is enriched in duet.

The game will likely never regain its bygone cultural prominence. But nor will it easily disappear. Sure, the asymptotic learning curve, the endless blunders and miscommunications can be painful. They can keep you up at night.

But as long as no one ends up divorced or dead, the agonies of the game are far outweighed by the powerful pleasure of stumbling with a partner toward perfection.

The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com